Enhancing Website Usability

So many companies focus on getting more traffic to their Ecommerce website rather than optimizing for the traffic they’re already getting. Why companies choose to forego the customers who are already on the website for those who haven’t even conducted a search yet is beyond me, but it happens each and every day. Enhancing the usability of your website is a great way to optimize for conversions and make the most out of the traffic you already have. Following are a couple of points to think about when enhancing your website usability.

Online Chat Support

Providing customers the ability to speak to a representative via online chat rather than telephone is a great way to minimize incoming calls while maximizing the power of the internet to assist customers. Online chat support can be used for exchanging links to product pages, downloads or anything else in addition to assisting customers. In an especially busy environment, a good typist & multi-tasker can handle a phone call and multiple chat sessions simultaneously, thus pleasing many customers at the same time instead of just one.

Helpful Video Content

Social Media doesn’t always have to be used in order to bring new traffic to your website. Video channels like YouTube can serve as staging grounds for an army of video tutorials or How-To’s designed to explain simple processes or product information to your customer so you don’t have to waste valuable time doing it. It’s not that we don’t want to explain things to our customers, but so many of the same questions are asked day in and day out that spotting recurring problems becomes a habit. Listen to your customers in these situations. If everyone is calling your technical support staff to learn how to do a particular thing, then create a video tutorial precisely for that. Direct customers to the video or send the link directly via online chat so your customers can get the information they need while you focus on other things.

Insight Through Abandoned Cart Recovery

Abandoned Cart Recovery systems are generally implemented to recover sales lost when a visitor abandons their shopping cart and leaves the website completely. While the goal is to turn those abandoned carts into sales, engaging the customer in this process can provide some very useful insight into problems in the purchase process which you can then solve before it chases more visitors away.

Split Testing

A tried-and-true method of optimizing your website for enhanced visitor experience is through split testing, which is a method of presenting two different versions of a webpage over a group of users to find a statistical representation of the most successful version. It’s easier to complete your split testing procedures when you have many visitors to your website. If your website doesn’t get a lot of traffic, collecting enough visits for your split test to mean anything could take too long.

There’s really no end to the various ways you can improve visitor experience and website usability just by listening to your customers once in awhile. They’re the one’s you want to keep hearing from, so you may as well start listening!